I apologize for the scarcity of links and references in this post. Perhaps I’ll go back and add them sometime, but it seems unlikely.

Todd Akin is sorry that he said he was sorry about that “legitimate rape” bullshit he spouted off a while back. This spiraled off in my head to a conclusion about just how fucked up America is now.

First: Akin. In his apology for his apology the shithead has the utter lack of humanity to write this,

“Is it a legitimate claim of rape or an excuse to avoid an unwanted pregnancy?”

Which pretty much sums up why I’ve decided that abortion should be absolutely legal without restrictions or inconvenience or excess questions right up until fucking labor starts; because assholes like him will do everything in their power to make women suffer.

Look, we live in a society where the idea of making a false rape accusation that lasts long enough for paperwork to happen is pretty damn stupid right off the bat, because we live in a society that treats rape victims worse that it treats rapists. I stand by that statement as long as we have situations where, for example, high school football stars sexually assault a teenage girl on fucking video that gets publicly posted to the fucking internet and not only does their whole community rally around them and against their victim, but it takes a massive online shitstorm to even bring them to trial. And then people cry about these poor “ruined lives”, and they’re talking about the fucking criminals having their lives ruined by being held accountable for their crimes! Meanwhile, the victim is ostracized and driven out for demanding justice. That’s American society today.

But getting to less hypothetical matters, why the fucking hell should any woman need an “excuse” to avoid an unwanted pregnancy? I see this over and over and over from actual politicians that actual people actually elected to actual office, the idea that women should have to justify their personhood somehow; that they are expected to either be sexually available and control pregnancy by, apparently, sheer force of will, because heaven forbid they take that sinful pill or something, and if they have the audacity to get pregnant they should just bite the bullet and fucking raise that bastard like the sluts they are, fighting tooth and nail to get even the token promise of help from, well, anybody, and if they want to deviate from that script at all they’d better have a damn good excuse.

That sentence got away from me a bit.

Look, women are people. They aren’t children, they aren’t semi-conscious incubatabots, they aren’t self-propelled fuckdolls. Women do not need to be barred from permanent sterilization until they’ve had three children, they can decide for themselves how many kids they want. Women do not need a 72 hour wait for an abortion to think it over, it’s safe to assume that they thought about it before they went into the office and if they do have any hesitation still there’s, you know, trained medical professionals to answer their questions right there. Women don’t need to be punished for having a sex drive, nobody does. Women don’t need to be harassed, bullied, or pressured to feel guilty for making decisions about their own lives that you disagree with, again, nobody does. This really isn’t that difficult to understand.

Frankly, I think the only reason shit like this still happens is that there’s such an undercurrent in our culture of the idea that sex is somehow shameful. Why, exactly, this is just joked about and cheerfully ignored with men while being treated deadly (sometimes literally!) seriously with women still isn’t clear to me.

So that’s how we’re fucked sexually, our culture glorifies sex while also forbidding it. Classic authoritarian control mechanism, really, create rules that can’t be followed and then everybody’s guilty and you have leverage on everyone. Like most authoritarian bullshit, it promotes misery and favors hypocrites and sociopaths. Fuck that shit.

But all this led me to thinking about how fucked up our political system is, because seriously our choices suck.

We’ve got the Republican Party, or as I’ve come to think of it, the Party of Human Suffering; which apparently is only surviving by massive gerrymandering at this point. Which hasn’t met a prejudice it didn’t like since the Wilson Administration, at least. Which seems to be fundamentally opposed to any form of fun that isn’t prohibitively expensive and preferably comes at the expense of another’s joy or dignity. Which includes contempt for science, education and critical thinking in actual party platforms. Which holds ignorance, pollution, and violence as virtues. Which increasingly shows disdain and outright contempt for the US Constitution, even as it claims to worship an imaginary ghost of that document. Which will hurt the poor rather than help them, even when helping is demonstrably cheaper, apparently out of pure spite. Which values ideological purity over reality. Fuck I’m sick of this list and I could keep going for a long time yet, let’s move on.

We have about a half-dozen little parties, which are functionally irrelevant thanks to our stupid broken fucking stupid two-party system, which ensures that voting for them is effectively voting Republican. Sometime when you want a taste of what-could-have-been, look up video of the 2012 third-party debate and compare it to the debates of the big two. It’s shocking, they actually discussed things rather than just spouting off catchphrases and empty rhetoric.

Finally, we have the Democratic Party, which is pretty much fucking useless because it contains all the politicians who aren’t batshit enough for the Republicans but too ambitious for the little parties. They have no identity to speak of, because the basic criteria are “not totally batshit” and “want a serious shot at the presidency”.

This is our fucked up nation, people.

We aren’t going to fix it by voting for the lesser of two evils, first we need to get more options than only two. This is a difficult proposition because some of the richest bastards in the world would like very much to keep the field small enough that they can easily buy all the pieces in play. I’d like to believe that last sentence is just my cynicism talking, but at this point I think I honestly believe it.

So yeah, that’s what I’ve got. Change the system away from the two-party shit. I’d like something like the preferential voting system used by Australia, where you can rank the weakest party first if you like but ultimately you will be counted either for the winner or the runner-up. Probably we could work out a better system if we didn’t have such fucking scumbags in government.

The other thing we can do is encourage thoughtful voting. This makes us enemies of the Tea Party right away, as they detest thinking, but I’m willing to live with that. I’ve written about this before, but to sum up the way we go about elections right now discourages thoughtful voting and encourages people to just, sort of… run with their tribe, I guess? Vote based on who had the best hair and slickest catchphrases? Abandon representative democracy based on votes and just shoot each other until the survivors give in to the psycho willing to go the farthest? (I think that’s the Tea Party strategy for 2016, actually.)

One problem is that our media has so abdicated its job as seekers of truth and askers of questions that it’s hard as hell to get a handle on issues. The internet should make this easy, but precious few people seem to want it to be easy, so instead everything gets buried under mountains of bullshit to the point where understanding an issue, almost any issue, becomes a full-time job of digging through shit to find facts. I’ll say again that we really, really should abandon televised debates for internet ones, which can back up their statements with hyperlinks.

Speaking of hyperlinks, there are far fewer of them in this post than I’d like due to time and network constraints. But I’ve got other things to do; what excuses do the politicians, press agents, and (to a lesser degree, in fairness) reporters have?